Boys' Ranch (1946)

• 60%
• 1946
• Adventure
• Drama
• Roy Rowland
• Jackie 'Butch' Jenkins
• James Craig
• Skip Homeier

Baseball player Dan Walker being benched doesn't bother him as it allows him to make the easy decision to be a full time Texas rancher - his goal to own his own ranch - and be at home with his wife and daughter, Susan and Mary. The one thing Dan will miss about not being a ball player is the casual friendship he has with a bunch of disadvantaged boys at his team's ballpark. Without knowing their full stories, Dan could always manage to get a few of them into the ballpark to watch games for free. When Dan learns that two of them, Skippy and Hank, will be sent to reform school, with the probable outcome being they growing up to be adult criminals due to that experience, Dan feels he has no choice but to take the two with him to Texas to try to get them jobs on ranches. Dan learns both that city boys being thrown into the deep end in ranching duties doesn't sit well with the locals, and that there are just as many disadvantaged boys in the country as there are in the city, they who just want three square meals they can call their own. Dan is able to convince his initially reluctant fellow ranchers to donate property and seed funds for a pilot project for a boys' ranch where they can raise their own food, have a roof over their heads, have some proper, caring adult guidance, and get a decent education in the process, the ranchers who only agree on the condition that Dan manage the ranch. With the ranch up, running and thriving, Susan worries most about a younger boy named Butch Taylor who doesn't seem to have ever learned how to be a real boy, while Dan has to worry about Skippy, who doesn't respond to authority, who just wants to live on his own rules, and who only understands what money can do in whatever manner he can get it. As such, Skippy may threaten the pilot moving into a permanent situation, one where all the other boys are responding in this supportive environment.